The Big Picture

Greg Nicotero, the special effects guru behind shows like The Walking Dead, discusses executive producing his passion project, the anthology series Creepshow. The fourth season of Creepshow includes a range of horror stories inspired by old pulp comics, featuring zombies, vampires, deadly video games, and more. Nicotero reveals his process for choosing stories, recruiting writers, and honoring the legacy of horror greats like George A. Romero in the series.

If you’ve loved horror at any point in your life, you’ve probably come across Greg Nicotero’s work. The special effects giant has worked on everything from Army of Darkness to The Walking Dead, the latter of which he continues to oversee as the zombified world expands with numerous spinoffs. He and his company, KNB EFX Group, are a staple in the world of creatures and gory special effects, with their hands in countless fantasy, science-fiction, and horror projects.

Close to Nicotero’s heart, though, is a little project called Creepshow, the anthology series inspired by the George A. Romero film of the same name from 1982. The series, which just premiered its fourth season on Shudder and AMC+, serves the same purpose as the film: telling a series of horror stories inspired by old pulp comics, ranging from the traditional zombies and vampires to more creative, never-before-seen concepts, including deadly video games, and tentacled monsters only appeased by the taste of human flesh.

Collider was excited to sit down with Nicotero to discuss the show’s fourth season, including its move from Atlanta to Toronto, Canada for production, and how he goes about choosing what kinds of stories fit a project like Creepshow. He also breaks down how he recruited writers for the season, honoring the legacy of Romero and other horror greats with the series, and how being a special effects artist affects the way he directs his own segments, including “Twenty Minutes With Cassandra” and “George Romero in 3-D!”.

Check out the full interview below, and stream all four seasons of Creepshow on Shudder and AMC+.

Image via Shudder

COLLIDER: It is great to meet you, Greg. I’m so excited to talk to you because I am also from Pittsburgh. I live about five minutes up the road from the Romero film school, so this is a very sort of personal thing for me.

GREG NICOTERO: Oh, wow! That’s great…So, you’re in Pittsburgh now?

Yeah! I’m in Monongahela, which is about an hour south of the city.

NICOTERO: I know, I’ve been down to that school a bunch of times.

Amazing.

NICOTERO: Well, how are you?

I’m good! How are you?

NICOTERO: Great. It’s crazy. I’m so excited. I’ve been in Paris for a year with Norman [Reedus] on [The Walking Dead:] Daryl Dixon, and it’s kind of like, “Oh yeah, I did this show called Creepshow last summer before I went to Paris, and here we are.” Because we shot last summer. We shot, like, June/July of last year, and then we waited until this October. You know, Walking Dead going until April kind of pushed through the production of Creepshow, so I’m really excited that we get a chance to come back on.

Yeah, it’s a fantastic season. You mentioned The Walking Dead, and I was curious, you’re obviously working on two very different horror things, but as an executive producer on that and a showrunner on this, is there any sort of carryover? Do you learn something from one thing and take it to the other?

NICOTERO: Oh, yeah. It’s crazy, I’m 60 years old, and I still learn stuff every day – I learn how to work with people, I learn how to get the best out of my crew. When we did Season 1 of Creepshow, I kind of thought, “Yeah, I’ve been producing Walking Dead for eight years. How hard could it be to run off and shoot this little show?” It was 100 times harder than I had ever expected it to be because it wasn’t the same woods or the same prison set or whatever; we were creating an entirely new universe every three and a half days. So, Season 1 was like riding a bucking bronco. I can’t believe I made it. Even when the show came out, and it was successful, and people liked it, I think the line producer went, “Really? What?” We had no money. I can’t believe we actually did it. [In] Seasons 2 and 3, I was a lot more confident, thinking, “Okay, we did it. Now I know what works, now I know what doesn’t work.” Then, now with Season 4, I feel my confidence level in choosing stories and choosing material and directors and things.

We moved the show from Atlanta to Canada, which was a big challenge, but we had a great production team up there. Production designer Rob Draper, our DP, came back with us. I love the production design team up there, and I love the art department and costumes and everybody. So it was like kind of, weirdly, starting over because we had a whole new crew in Canada, and I was really a little nervous about that, but everybody just jumped in and was really excited about it. So, I think it shows.

Image via Shudder

It does. When it comes to choosing the stories, do you go in with a specific vision of, “This is the number of stories, and this is the kind of stories we wanna tell,” or is it kind of just like picking from a giant pile like a kid in a candy store?

NICOTERO: It’s literally a giant pile. If I love the story, then it goes into the pile – the smaller pile, of course. But it’s interesting because a lot of times I’ll get pitched either sometimes it’s just a little paragraph, sometimes it’s a one-page outline, and other times it’s a full-fledged script. A lot of people get excited to submit stories. So, for me, it’s really a challenge. But if I read it, I’m like, “Oh yes, definitely put that on the pile.” This season, I had an opportunity to introduce a lot of new writers: Todd [Spence] and Zak [White] that wrote “George Romero in 3-D!;” “Grieving Process” was written by a guy named Mike McCarty, who is a makeup FX artist, who used to work at KNB; and then “To Grandmother’s House We Go” was written by Bill Butler, who’s an actor who’s been in a ton of genre stuff. I feel like in Season 4 I had a chance to kind of reach out to people who I had worked with before or admired or just knew, and said, “Hey, we’re doing Creepshow, pitch me an episode! Send me something, and let’s see if we can get it in the pipeline.” You know, John Esposito, Mike Scannell. We have a lot of new writers. And then, of course, Erik Sandoval and Michael Rousselet are back. So there’s a lot of great variety.

Of course, Jamie Flanagan, who wrote “Cassandra” in 20 minutes. I watched Midnight Mass and reached out to Mike [Flanagan] and told Mike how much I love the show and realized that Jamie had written a lot of it. It was funny, I said, “Hey, do you have anything for Creepshow?” And he’s like, “No, not really…” and then within 20 minutes he called me back, “Wait, I have something!” And I read the script and went “Okay, I’m directing that,” and put that in the “Greg’s Directing That” pile. So, really just a great, great group of writers and directors and actors.

When it comes to picking those things, obviously Creepshow is a pretty lasting legacy, we have the films that came before, so is there any sort of pressure to feel beholden to Romero’s legacy at all, or because it’s an anthology thing, do you think, “Hey, boom out of the gate, let them do whatever they wanna do?”

NICOTERO: I think, inherently, we’re paying tribute to George’s legacy all the time by continuing Creepshow. My obligation is to keep his legacy alive and the legacy of other filmmakers, [like] Tobe [Hooper], Wes Craven, people that I work with that I love that are no longer with us, plus directors that I’ve admired – John Carpenter, John Landis. So I really think that by just Creepshow existing, we’re continuing the legacy and paying tribute to it. I think the stories in and of themselves, you know, the thing that makes Creepshow different than most other anthologies is there aren’t any rules. You can have one that’s a comedy, you can have one that’s suspenseful, you can have one that’s got a dark ending, you can have one that’s fun, and they all fit within the world because the original framework was it’s a comic book. So, every story can be a little bit different, and I think that really sets it aside from every other anthology, which seems to be rooted in common DNA. I think our DNA is a little mutated, which makes it, for me, a lot more fun.

Image via Shudder

It’s very fun, and I think the way that you’ve also picked which episodes go with which, they’re paired really well. So when it comes to doing that, when it comes to picking the order, it feels almost kind of like picking the order of songs on an album. What is the process there?

NICOTERO: It’s really challenging. That’s a great question because we don’t shoot them in the same order that we air them. So a lot of times, it really is kind of tricky to go, “Okay, what’s the tone of this one? How do we wanna grab the audience? How do we wanna leave the audience when the series ends?” So it really is challenging to pick those stories and sort of pair them together. I think that’s one of the hardest things.

I know that I wanted “Cassandra” to be in the first episode because I thought that was one of the most unique stories that I had ever read. To get Samantha [Sloyan] and Ruth [Codd] in there with Jamie’s story, I fell in love immediately with that story. Then I thought, “Okay, well, you gotta follow that one. You gotta keep the audience engaged, so you can’t jump into all of a sudden, something that feels so dramatically different that it’s going from like the hot tub to the ice-cold swimming pool.” So we went with “Smile,” which I think John Harrison and the writer, Mike Scannell, did a great, great job. So, keeping those sort of lined up.

But it is tricky. We have to be very resourceful because of the amount of resources that we have to create the show because the show is affordable. So, being clever about things really, [and] I think that the team in Toronto did an amazing job of helping us. I think our production value looks bigger in Toronto because we had a lot more locations. So, like in “The Hat,” we were in a high-rise building, and for a lot of the show, we spent a lot more time on location than we did on stage. A lot of that also had to do with coming out of COVID, where we had to stay on stage in Seasons 2 and 3. I feel like the show has opened up a lot more.

Yeah, for sure. It also has some really great creature effects. Creatures are very near and dear to my heart, and I imagine they are for you as well because you have created pretty much every creature I’ve ever loved as a kid. When it comes to directing, because you obviously worked on “Twenty Minutes With Cassandra,” which has some pretty gnarly monsters in it, does your experience with designing makeup FX affect how you direct, like, “Okay, well, we can only do so much with this creature. It can only move this way?” Does that affect the way that you’re thinking about directing?

NICOTERO: Sure! And look, I mean, it makes me proud. Like I said, we have to be very resourceful on Creepshow, but the truth of the matter is having the resources of KNB EFX and my company behind me to be able to do this… Everyone talks about the creature effects in Creepshow because I have the ability to work with Carey Jones and my team there and give them early looks at the scripts and sit down with them and design everything, and then I fly off and shoot the show. As an example, the monster in “Cassandra,” which ironically was played by Carey Jones, in the plot, his arm has been gnawed off because he’s this weird, giant rat creature/mouse creature that gnawed its arm off. So we had to build the suit of this dangling missing limb. I knew that there were only certain angles because we had to hide Carey’s arm behind him, so I knew that there were only certain angles that we could film him from, but again, knowing that and understanding that allows me to design how I would shoot the entire sequence, knowing that we have to play into that element.

Even the references of, like, in “Parent Death Trap,” the ghosts. A lot of people were really concerned, and like, “Well, why do they have to be transparent and we have to see through them?” And I was using The Frighteners as a reference, and saying, “Look, this has some tone, this has a little Peter Jackson flair and tone to it because of the performances of the ghosts, so it has to feel that way.” Even the aliens. The crazy thing about the alien in “Cheat Code” was I wanted this cool bulbous alien, and we had gone back and forth. I think in the original script, they had found the alien in a warehouse, and the warehouse was proving to be a bit challenging, and I said, “Wait, why don’t we shoot it in the woods? But can we build a crashed spaceship?” So I found these pictures online of these little single-man UFOs that people had created for their backyards, and the art department went off and built this unbelievable little spaceship, and it was just so much fun and so cool. That, and then we got to do a cool werewolf episode, so I really feel like we definitely lean into the creature stuff, and I think the audience expects it.